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Whether you need to find a particular design in a set of files or mark up and communicate data with your design team, a drawing viewer of some sort is essential. In the viewer market, no onesize-fits-all application exists. A small, AutoCAD-only design firm has different requirements than a large design house that might use SolidWorks, Inventor and CATIA in addition to AutoCAD. Your needs might extend to showing models to clients, in which case you may need more-sophisticated viewing options than suffice for in-house use.
When deciding which viewer is appropriate for your needs, the first question is whether the viewer supports the file types you use most commonly. Do you work in just 2D, or is some of your work 3D? What do you need to do with the drawing files? Is a simple viewer enough, or do you need to control layers, view attributes or view cross sections? Do you require markup and redlining tools? Are you working alone or do you need an enterprise-wide viewer? Does the viewer enable easy navigation within both files and directory structure? What is the cost of the application compared with the feature set? Lots of questions, but fortunately there are many capable applications from which to choose.
For this roundup, our original intention was to test CAD 2D/3D file viewers with both AutoCAD and SolidWorks test files. As it turned out, the scope was broader than I expected: some excellent viewers supported only a few AutoCAD file formats and no SolidWorks formats, and other viewers supported more than 400 different file formats. I ended up testing each of the viewers with a variety of file formats, including specific files that I knew would be problematical based on past experiences. I was impressed with the overall quality of the viewers and their nimbleness in handling a variety of files.
File formats, both 2D and 3D, change frequently. Take AutoCAD files as an example and note the number of changes that have occurred to the DWG file format over the years. You may well need to view and work with files that go back a number of years, so even a single format such as DWG has numerous variants-some of which may contain components that are not...